ARHT MEDIA HOLOPRESENCE

IN THE FIELD: ARHT MEDIA HOLOPRESENCE

FRESH FROM SIGNING A UAE AND QATAR DISTRIBUTION DEAL WITH NMK ELECTRONICS, HOLOGRAMBASED TECHNOLOGY PROVIDER ARHT MEDIA IS PLANNING A MAJOR MIDDLE EAST EXPANSION. TPMEA CATCHES UP WITH CEO, LARRY O’REILLY TO DISCUSS THE FUTURE OF THIS EXCITING TECH.

Nobody could argue with the fact that video conferencing tools have been invaluable over the past 18 months. However, as many are tiring of Teams and experiencing a chronic case of Zoom fatigue, increasingly individuals and organisations are looking to alternative ways of keeping in touch while international travel remains difficult. Offering a futuristic solution to this universal issue is ARHT Media, whose HoloPresence technology allows presenters or artists to appear as a hyper-realistic, life-sized hologram, with the ability to interact with a live audience with no noticeable latency.

“We’re in the business of beaming people around the world,” began ARHT Media CEO, Larry O’Reilly. “We have studios all over the world – from Toronto, New York, LA and London to Hong Kong, Singapore, Tel Aviv and soon Dubai and Qatar. We are the only company with a global footprint that is doing this.” O’Reilly was speaking to TPMEA during a trip to Dubai following the company’s recent deal with NMK Electronics, which saw NMK become the exclusive ARHT Media distributor for the UAE and Qatar. “The Gulf Region is embracing technology to overcome time and geography possibly quicker than any other place on earth right now,” said O’Reilly, discussing the partnership. “With NMK’s proven track record of working with government, enterprise and education in the region, we couldn’t have found a better partner.”

The CEO was in town to join NMK in hosting a two-day event at Dubai World Trade Centre, which showed off ARHT Media’s technology to more than 80 guests, ranging from consultants and creative agencies to system integrators and end users. “As a value-added distributor, it’s our duty to always integrate new technologies in the market in areas where we can see a potential growth in demand,” stated NMK’s Business Development Director, Dino Drimakis. “We’ve already had a lot of interest and this event will help educate potential clients even further about a technology that we believe will be the future in a range of different sectors.”

While the agreement with NMK represents a major step forward in ARHT’s operations in the Middle East, the company is no stranger to the region, having worked on several high-profile activations – the most notable of which saw the Crown Prince of Dubai, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, turned into a hologram for his speech at the World Government Summit in 2019.

“The mandate that we were given was that when Sheikh Hamdan was giving his speech, nobody in the audience should know that it’s a hologram – they had to believe that it was him standing on stage,” O’Reilly recalled. “The rationale behind that was that his speech was on the seven trends of future cities – with one of the trends being hologram technology lessening the need for travel. We then did a big reveal, turning

him blue like a character from Star Wars, before he eventually walked out on stage in person at the end of his speech.”

While a typical HoloPresence setup uses largely off-the-shelf equipment, including a traditional green screen, 4K camera, lighting, microphone, and projection, the real ‘secret sauce’ comes in the form of the software, as well as a proprietary highly reflective painted screen. “There’s also our staging expertise and ability to advise on how to capture a person in an ideal way to be presented in a hologram,” he added.

The company recently expanded its offering to include a plug-and-play option designed specifically for university lecture halls, corporate training facilities, government training centres or larger meeting or board rooms – the HoloPod. “This comprises the same basic display technology, but it’s inside a cabinet that’s on wheels,” O’Reilly outlined. “Everything is already calibrated, so it’s just a case of connecting it to power and the internet and it’s ready to go.”

Reporting “strong interest already” in the HoloPod, the CEO believes that the solution will be a big hit in the Middle East. “The beauty of this region is that there’s a genuine appetite here for having the newest and most exciting new technology available. With Expo 2020 and the World Cup in Qatar just around the corner, these are incredibly exciting times and the potential for growth in every sector is simply massive.”

O’Reilly also highlighted the company’s online platform, Virtual Global Stage. “Where that becomes really powerful is when you have speakers in different locations around the world; you can put them on stage together and they can interact with each other with no noticeable latency,” he explained. “The other important factor is that people are presented head to toe, so you get all the body language, which is more than 50% of communication. When you see a person’s whole body, you can pick up on signals that they are ready to talk, so it becomes a much more natural, free-flowing conversation, which means less fatigue for the audience.”

Up until a couple of years ago, the company was marketing its product as ‘the next best thing to being there in person’. However, in recent years, the message has changed somewhat. “What we’ve found now is that we were underselling ourselves,” O’Reilly revealed. “Audience feedback has shown that when an event is a mixture of hologram and in-person presenters, the audience is more engaged, and the presentation is more memorable.”

He added: “When you present somebody on stage who is life-size and lifelike – high resolution and appears to be 3D – and there’s no latency noticeable in the audio, then as an audience member, your brain is telling you that the person is there. That is called ‘creating presence’, and that’s what we specialise in.”

With a range of potential applications, from the pharmaceutical industry to universities, government, corporate and, of course, live events, according to Drimakis, ARHT’s technology is the perfect addition to NMK’s rapidly expanding portfolio. “Given the fact that we’re in multiple industries across multiple sectors, this not only adds to that dynamic, but it allows us to engage with a number of partners that we’re already working with for them to be able to offer this solution to both events and fixed installs,” he commented. “NMK has always been about steering the latest and greatest technologies into the market. We do a lot of due diligence when we add new vendors into our portfolio, and we are always striving to work with the best in class. There’s a huge potential and it’s up to us to deliver now.”

While ARHT’s business has gone from 100% live events to now less than half of work coming from the live space, with much more focus on the corporate and educational markets in recent years, O’Reilly explained that the company would never move away from its live events roots completely. “We will stay in the events business for two main reasons,” he revealed. “Firstly, it remains profitable; and secondly, it’s a great source of marketing – often the first time that people will experience our technology will be at an event, and you can guarantee that people will talk about it after they see it.”

However, with the company recently signing a 100-location deal with flexible workspace provider, WeWork, the long-term future of ARHT Media seems to lie mainly away from the stage. “Our long-term vision is to humanise digital communication,” O’Reilly concluded. “We want to provide tools that people can use every day to reduce their travel and improve their online communication.” Photos: NMK Electronics www.arhtmedia.com www.nmkelectronics.com